Did any of the dishes served there taste good? She sometimes felt guilty about the lack of gusto with which the diners ate the swordfish in parsley sauce or the breaded filet. There were two chefs: she was one, the other was a woman in her fifties from Burgos. They were both good cooks, but it was impossible to make a decent salad with iceberg lettuce and tomatoes that looked like the fruit of some nuclear disaster. The canned carrots and beets tasted of acidity regulators. The salchichas were veined with long strips of tough pork. The green vegetables in the mixed salad were always soggy, even though they weren’t overcooked, and the mayonnaise left a sour taste in the mouth. Toxic fat seeped from the longaniza sausage and they had to make the Spanish omelet with roast potatoes left over from breakfast, scraping off the thyme before mixing them with the pasteurized egg and milk. She wasn’t even allowed to add a splash of olive oil to the pan to brighten up the dish. The fish, which came in large bags, was always dry and there seemed to be no difference between the hake and the cod. The only things she liked preparing for herself were the vegetarian sandwiches, with either hard-boiled or fried egg. When she chose to fry the egg, the yolk would ooze greasily out of the small holes in the bread. She’d gotten into the habit of having a fried egg sandwich for lunch and a hardboiled egg one for dinner almost every day. Except for the lentil soup, which was served once a week, she couldn’t stand anything else on the menu. She got through the mornings on orange juice from a carton, and on Wednesdays sighed with pleasure over her bowl of lentil soup. The fact was that she and La Burgos had no option but to follow the recipe book, which stipulated the daily menu and the dishes that were to lie like dead insects in the display cabinet at the bar. La Burgos, who lived in the city with her electrician husband and two children, used to say that they shouldn’t complain, since trying to make anything halfway good with those inferior ingredients would just be frustrating.